Mission Impossible

This year I decided I wanted a fair trade prom dress. I figured it would be easy to find one- surely a ton of designers out there were selling adorable fair trade silk dresses, right? Well after hours of Googling "fair trade prom dress" and "fair trade formal," I had come up with nothing except cute, but definitely not prom appropriate, cotton dresses and wedding gowns.

On a side note, http://www.peopletree.co.uk/ is a great site for fair trade and organic clothing and it's pretty affordable :)

Still, I wanted a fair trade prom dress. I talked to a friend of mine in class who asked me why I didn't just make a dress. My response: I can't sew to save my life, let alone create a dress worthy of wearing to prom. That's when she offered to create the dress for me.

So now it looks like I'm going to be ordering fair trade fabric and having her create a dress. While it's still been difficult finding the fabrics I want, I think I'm getting closer to having a gorgeous, fair trade dress for the  prom.

This experience really got me thinking about how difficult it is to commit to shopping fair trade. In Salem, we're lucky to have One Fair World as a place to buy jewelry and gifts and even some food, but in a lot of places, the only source of fair trade goods is the internet. As I've found out, it's extremely hard to find what you're looking for, and it's even harder to tell if a source is legitimite.

As with anything, the more active demand for certified fair trade goods, the more industires will begin to listen and change to more ethical practices, which means more choices for us. And who knows, maybe some day soon there will be a whole collection of designer dresses for girls wanting to go fair trade for their prom.